The Military History of China bestselling author Erik Durschmied traces China's passage through a thousand years of war, colonial adventurism and internecine politics, and seeks to understand what this huge and unstoppable country is today - as well as what the future holds for a fragile world in which China is the latest economic and military superpower. Until the Communist revolution just a few decades ago, the West saw China as a world closed in on itself. The earliest Chinese called it the Kingdom of the Middle, believing themselves to be at the centre of the world. Centuries of trade with Europeans, drawn eastward by China's unique skill with silk and porcelain, only reinforced the image of an ancient dragon enfolded in a sleep of ages. Yet that solemn exterior concealed a history more nightmare than peaceful dream. Long ago China engaged in brutal tribal wars and rapacious conquests of territory stretching from the far shores of Asia to Eastern Europe. Back in the mid-thirteenth century Mongol hordes obliterated an army of Europe's finest knights and terrorized whole populations. Seven hundred years later China went to war with Japan, took on UN forces in Korea and squared up to the Soviet Union and America. Over the centuries in between, the Chinese sought bloody conflict with Muslims, Jews, Christians and Buddhists and, in more recent times, lived through political conflict that claimed tens of millions of lives. Long the world's most populous country, China has always flexed its muscles beyond its borders, for all its contemplative religion and dreamlike art. Catastrophic clashes with other countries are a thread woven into the fabric of the nation's history. Today China stands on the threshold of global economic domination, a true rival to the United States: in a generation or so it will be twice as wealthy as the US, Britain, France, Germany and Italy combined.
